Shock Poll: ISIS' Approval Rating in France is...16 Percent?

Daniel Doherty

8/26/2014 3:15:00 PM - Daniel Doherty

Nonetheless, these numbers send shivers down my spine. In essence, the poll suggests that a growing number of French citizens sympathize with ISIS, a group known, among other things, for using terrifying acts of cruelty and other forms of barbarism to expand their Islamic caliphate.

“No just God would stand for what [ISIS] did yesterday and what they do every day,” President Obama recently said, referring to the brutal slaying of an American photojournalist last week. And yet what we’re finding out is that thousands and thousands of impressionable would-be radicals (including children) are joining their ranks and participating in their bloodlust. The notion therefore that ISIS was ever a “jayvee” team (as the president once implied) has been sufficiently disproved.

Meanwhile, ISIS is threatening to execute another American aid worker if the U.S. doesn’t capitulate to their demands:

A third American hostage held by ISIS has been identified as a 26-year-old American woman who was kidnapped a year ago while doing humanitarian relief work in Syria. The terror group is demanding $6.6 million and the release of U.S. prisoners for the life of the young woman, who the family requested not be identified.

She is the third of at least four Americans who were known to be held by ISIS, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. American journalist James Foley was executed by the group in a video that appeared online last week. Another writer, Steven Sotloff, was seen alive but under duress in the same footage.

The rise of ISIS is a terrifying and global phenomenon. But what’s more terrifying, perhaps, is that a plurality of Western Europeans actually support what they're doing, and what they stand for.